(2019-01-30) Maurya Reorder Your Chain Of Beliefs With A Leaner Lean Canvas

Ash Maurya: Reorder your Chain of Beliefs with a leaner Lean Canvas. The real challenge isn’t idea generation, but idea validation....at the earliest stages, however, it helps to more narrowly focus attention on just the two outer boxes of the canvas: Customer segment and Problem. (Customer Discovery)

You can also use this customer/problem quadrant to test your desirability, viability, and feasibility risks.

Desirability

A good UVP (Unique Value Proposition) is narrow (targets early adopters) and specific (nails a problem).

If you can describe your customer’s problems better than they can, there is an automatic transfer of expertise — your customers start believing that you must also have the right solution for them.

Viability

pricing should be set relative to problems and outcomes — not your solution.

Feasibility

If your customers are currently spending money (or a proxy for money, like time) on solving a problem with an existing alternative, that’s often a good enough proxy signal for a problem worth solving at this stage

Be Wary of Your Innovator Bias

Most people start with a solution and then search for problems. But in a world where the biggest risk is building something nobody wants, it’s more effective to reverse this order. If your customer and problems assumptions are not yet grounded in empirical learning, it’s prudent to first get them in order.

you need to be able to make the case for the problems listed in this quadrant without relying on your solution. How do you that?

By describing problems with respect to your customer’s existing alternatives instead

don’t focus on problems you can solve with your solution. Rather focus on problems your customers encounter when using existing alternatives.